The
Johnny Depp Zone Interview
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Sweet Sensation

On
the cutting edge with Johnny Depp, the offbeat hero of Edward
Scissorhands

He
was born Depp. He has always been Depp. As a boy, he was ridiculed
for it. In the schoolyard, he was called Dipp. Or Deppity Dawg. Later
he was called Johnny Deeper, this based upon a popular
adolescent joke he barely remembers: “Something about some
guy
having sex with some girl who kept saying, ‘Johnny,
deeper!’”
He conjures up this dark memory with visible embarrassment. Being
Depp, you see, has never been easy.

Depp
came into my life during his Hollywood years, a time when the Depp
name had begun to really stand for something. The day we met, he
extended his hand to shake mine, except that his hand was not a hand
so much as it was weaponry. In place of fingers, there were blades.
This was the sort of unpredictability I would later come to expect
from Depp. At the moment, however, we were on a Twentieth Century
Fox sound stage where he was making Edward Scissorhands,
his
second major film, in which he portrayed the man-made boy with
scissors for fingers. He laughed quietly at his own comic gesture
and then introduced me to his attorneys, who hovered nearby. (Depp
is a master of the ironic nuance.) Soon he was asking me what I knew
of Al Capone and doing his impersonation of Warren Beatty blinking.
Such is the irrepressible spirit of Depp.

Now
I will reveal all that I know of Johnny Depp. I will tell of our
adventures together: the time we found Jesus, or a guy who said he
was Jesus, on Santa Monica Boulevard and Depp gave him cigarettes. The
time we ate eggs with his movie-star fiancée, Winona
Ryder, whom he loves profoundly. The time we trespassed on Harry
Houdini’s abandoned property in the Hollywood Hills and got
yelled
at. I will describe his tattoos, his problem facial hair, his
recurring nightmares that feature the Skipper from Gilligan’s
Island. Clearly, biographers have never gotten much of the
real
Depp, focusing instead on the surface Depp. This, then, is an
all-new Depp—a man who lives hard, loves hard, but most of
all,
thinks hard.

The
days I knew Depp best came and went quickly. There were three of
them in all. They were November days, as I recall. The first one
began in a coffee shop, as so many things do in the life of John
Christopher Depp II. Winona had left him that day. Left him at the
coffee shop. Then she drove off to do some errands. So he was very
much alone. He was smoking too much and drinking too much coffee,
but who could blame him? He said he was enslaved by caffeine and
nicotine and didn’t sound proud of it. “I like to
be pumped up
and hacking phlegm at the same time,” he said wryly.

“Coupla
tequila worms flying out here and there,” Depp said, but he
was
joking about that. He hadn’t touched the hard stuff for a
solid
month, maybe longer. Depp was as dry as he’d been in all of
his
twenty-seven years.

Nobody
recognized Depp in public places, not when I was with him. He is a
man of the people and therefore doesn’t stand out much. Yes,
he
continues to be a teen idol and a heartthrob (“a throbbing
thing,”
he calls himself), but frankly he looks like someone else. Director
John Waters, who cast Depp as a delinquent grease ball in the film
Cry-Baby, used to imagine him as “the
best-looking gas
station attendant who ever lived.” Or as Waters lately told
me
appreciatively, “Johnny could play a wonderfully sexy mass
murderer. I mean, it is a part made for
him.” Which is to
say, there is a shadiness to Depp. He looks unattractively unwashed.
(“Nobody looks better in rags,” said Waters of the
basic Depp
sartorial statement.) As such, he does not possess the burden of
great presence. He speaks and moves with quiet dignity. You hardly
know he is there. It is easy to sit in silence with him, although
ultimately—and I think he would agree here—not very
interesting.

If
Depp is anything, he
is
interesting. He takes the big risks. Tom Cruise, the rumor
goes, wanted
to play the role of tragic,
disfigured Edward Scissorhands—but only if his face was
cosmetically restored by picture’s end. Not
Depp. He wore
Edward’s scars like medals. And
he wore the unwieldy,
imposing
hand shears with brio, recognizing the lyric poetry in
Edward’s
fateful curse. (Edward, who cannot touch anything without slashing
it, is a metaphor for the outsider in all of us, including Depp, who
knows what it’s like to be mocked for being a little
different. He
is, after all, a teen idol.) “He certainly was closest to the
image of the character,” says Tim Burton, who directed Depp
in
Edward and Jack Nicholson in Batman and
Michael Keaton
in Beetlejuice and Pee-wee Herman in Pee-wee’s
Big
Adventure, as well as many other actors in those same
movies. “Like Edward, Johnny really is perceived as something
he’s not.
Before we met, I’d certainly read about him as the Difficult
Heartthrob. But you look at him and you get a feeling. There is a
lot of pain and humor and darkness and light. I think for him [the
role] is probably very personal. It’s just a very strong
internal
feeling of loneliness. It’s not something he talks about or
even
can talk about, because it’s sad, ya know. What are ya gonna
do?”

If
you are Depp, you do what you can. Indeed, so devoted to
Edward’s
metaphoric millstone was he that, when smoking offscreen, Depp
stoically learned to hold his cigarettes between the
scissors’
blades. During shooting days in Florida, when temperatures soared
above 110 degrees, he stayed trussed up in Edward’s black
leather
bodysuit without complaint. “I would freak out,”
said Winona,
who played Edward’s dream girl in the film, “just
thinking of how
he must feel, like if he had an itch or if he had to go to the
bathroom . . .” But Depp, being Depp, simply
suffered in
silence
and dramatically cut down on his coffee intake. He learned to ignore
his bladder and thus diminish the likelihood of horrible
self-inflicted wounds. It was no wonder, really, that his
performance demonstrated such admirable restraint. “I had to
just
sort of deal with it,” he would say later, a better man for
having
endured for his craft.

“If
there’s any movie in the history of the entire world, and
even in
the history of any literature,” Depp said triumphantly,
“Edward
Scissorhands was the movie I would want to do. And I
fuckin’
did it. When I first saw it, I was scared, because I kept thinking,
‘God, I just can’t believe I did this
fuckin’ movie.’”

But
then Depp is an impassioned, if
unlikely, aesthete, a bedraggled
literateur of sorts. He is a high-school dropout
with a lust
for first editions. Once I saw him pay seventy-five dollars for a
rare Hemingway as if it were a pack of Marlboros, and I noticed the
swagger in his stride when he carried the book off. He cites Jack
Kerouac and J. D. Salinger, two idols, with staggering frequency. His
most prized possession—and one that cost him a good portion
of
his burgeoning fortune—is a book on black culture in whose
margins
Kerouac has scribbled and doodled. “It’s a piece of
history,”
he told me reverently. “I look at it every day.”

And
then there is fine art:

“Gacy!” Depp
said excitedly, in reference to imprisoned mass murderer
John Wayne Gacy. There, in our coffee shop, I had handed him an
order form listing Gacy’s latest oil paintings, knowing that
Depp
was the owner of a Gacy clown portrait. (Depp, incidentally, lives
in mortal fear of clowns.) “The Hi Ho Series!”
he
exclaimed, impressed. “Shit!” He perused the form,
shuddered,
then told me that he’d gotten rid of his Gacy canvas.
“When I
got it, I heard the money was going to the families of the
victims,”
he said, but later he suspected otherwise. “The paintings are
really scary and weird and great, but I don’t want to
contribute to
something as evil as that.”

We
went walking that evening. Depp
likes to walk. “It’s good
butt exercise,” he told me. “It’s good
for the rump.” Depp,
it turns out, has no car. He does have a broken truck. For a long
time, he had no home. He and Winona moved from hotel to hotel until
they recently got a place in Beverly Hills. They did share a loft in
New York for a brief time, but they tired of the east. So they came
west, where no one walks except for Depp (whenever Winona is using
their rental car, that is). But even on foot, Depp is like a
dedicated motorist, ever vigilant of traffic minutiae. “Your
seat
belt! Your seat belt!” he hollered into the snarl of Beverly
Boulevard, where we trod along. Depp had spotted a man driving with
his seat belt dragging out on the pavement and could not bear to
think of the consequences. The startled driver now owes his life to
Depp. Likewise, Depp spotted a woman driving with her door ajar.
“Your door!” he yelled. “Your door is
open!” No doubt,
that very woman is now living a rich and productive life, thanks to
the selfless instincts of a certain movie actor who is currently
looking carefully for his next big project.

Once,
when he was very young, Depp harbored an irrational fear of John
Davidson, the great musical entertainer. Today Depp has conquered
that fear and, in fact, even appeared in a major motion picture with
Davidson. (In Edward Scissorhands, Davidson
convincingly
played a talk-show host who interviews Depp, as Edward.) “He
was a
really sweet guy,” said Depp magnanimously. “I felt
bad for ever
being scared of him.” So imagine Depp’s reaction
when we
purchased a map to the stars’ homes from a street peddler,
and the
very first address he saw was Davidson’s.
“Oooooh—John
Davidson!” he crowed, reading off the numbers and displaying
no
residue of unexorcised terror. This was one cured customer. (Of
course, we never went to Davidson’s house. We
didn’t go to
anyone’s house—not to Peter Falk’s or
Sandy Koufax’s or
Phyllis Diller’s or Anna Maria Alberghetti’s. We
were, after
all, on foot.)

Instead,
we wandered aimlessly, and he spoke of his darkest visions.
“The
most disturbing dream I ever had,” Depp said, “and
I hope this is
taken the right way, because I’m sure he was a very sweet
man, was
one where Alan Hale Jr., the Skipper [on Gilligan’s
Island],
was chasing me. He was in his wardrobe from the show—the
white cap
and white pants and everything, and I was running from him. He got
on a bicycle and chased me into this weird little apartment, really
small, very low rent. I looked over to my right, and there was an
elderly woman, ethnic looking, squatting. She raised up her muumuu
and took a piss. I got the fuck out of there immediately, because
she was very evil. Then I remember diving over the bushes, where the
Skipper was trying to get me, and then I woke up.”

By
now, the origins of Depp are familiar to most functioning
Americans.

Born
in Owensboro, Kentucky, the self-styled barbecue capital of the
world, Depp was the fourth child of John Depp, a city engineer, and
his wife, Betty Sue, a waitress at many fine coffee shops. (Her
famous son would later have her name tattooed above his left bicep,
so as to balance the Indian chief tattooed on his right one, a
talisman of his partial Cherokee bloodline.) Depp was a small boy,
so early on he learned to rely on his fists, especially when
fighting. Eventually, his family settled in Miramar, Florida, and
Depp, seven at the time, elected to go with them.

Rebellious
in school, he was once suspended for mooning a gym teacher. He
learned to smoke by age twelve and then drink and finally take drugs.
By fourteen, however, he is said to have sworn off drugs forever. Two
years later, his parents divorced, and soon after, Depp quit high
school to join a rock band called the Kids, who became a local
sensation and opening act for the likes of Talking Heads, the B-52s
and Iggy Pop. (He remembers that his first words to Iggy Pop, one of
his heroes and later a friend, were, inexplicably, “Fuck you,
fuck
you, fuck you.” In response, a perplexed Pop called him a
“little
turd.”)

At
twenty, he married Lori Anne Allison, a twenty-five-year-old musician
and relative of a band mate, and together (band included) they left
Florida for Hollywood, where the Kids broke up and so did Depp and
Lori. Alone and starving, Depp turned to acting and made his screen
debut in the original Nightmare on Elm Street as a
guy
swallowed by a bed. (Grateful to this day for the break, Depp
graciously will appear in the next Elm Street
sequel
as a
cameo murder victim.) Then came Platoon, in which
Depp plays
an interpreter who dies off-camera. But his movie career would have
to wait: Depp next became, for four years, America’s favorite
boy
detective.

He
was undercover high-school cop Tom Hanson on Fox’s 21
Jump
Street, a television series Depp hated and never saw more
than
six episodes of. Still, it transformed him into
the major show-business figure he is today, and, better yet, the
babes loved him. Beautiful actresses flocked to his side. Before it
was over, there were two failed engagements: to Sherilyn Fenn (Twin
Peaks) and to Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing).
Then the TV
show was canceled. But by now John Waters had hired him to star as
the misunderstood hood Cry-Baby Walker—his first big-screen
lead
role!—in the troubled-teen musical Cry-Baby
that was
released last April. And it was during this time that he met Winona
Ryder, the girl who would change his life forever.

On
my second day with Depp, Winona
Ryder showed up. She is nineteen
and all pluck, the thinking man’s actress for her generation.
Depp
is the thinking man who thinks of her most. He swells in her
presence. When they hug, they hug fiercely, in focused silence;
their squeeze keeps regrouping. They seem to be lost in each other. She
smokes his cigarettes, and she is not a smoker.
(“You’re on
the filter, babe,” he will coach her.)

Hands
locked, they descended upon Barney’s Beanery, a frequent
haunt, for
caffeine, which they now took in desperate helpings. She wore a Tom
Waits T-shirt and Depp’s engagement ring. She was saying,
“I’d
never seen anyone get a tattoo before, so I was pretty squeamish, I
guess.” Depp chuckled and said, “She kept taking
the bandage off
and staring at it afterwards.” They were speaking of Winona
Forever, the third and final (for now) Depp tattoo, eternally
etched onto his epidermis: locus, right shoulder. (Depp told me he
plans to have his tattoos pickled after his death as keepsakes for
his children should there be any.) This one was carved on at a
nearby tattoo parlor as Winona watched with awe. “I sort of
was in
shock,” she said. “I kept thinking it was going to
wash off or
something. I couldn’t believe it was real.” Her
eyes widened. “I mean, it’s a big thing, because it’s
so permanent!”

“It
ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Depp said, and by
this I knew he meant
business. Over hash and eggs, they then traced the history of their
romance for me: He knew her work (Beetlejuice, Heathers)
and
she knew his, but they did not know each other. At the premiere of
Great Balls of Fire, a film in which she played
Jerry Lee
Lewis’s child bride, they spotted each other from across the
lobby. “I was getting a Coke,” Ryder said.
“It was a classic
glance,” he said, “like the zoom lenses in West
Side Story, and everything else gets foggy.” She said,
“It wasn’t a
long moment, but it was suspended.” He said, “I
knew then.” They did not meet that night. Months later, a
mutual friend dragged
her to Depp’s hotel room at the Chateau Marmont, where John
Belushi
last drew breath, and this is where they began. “I thought
maybe
he would be a jerk,” she said. “I didn’t
know. But he was
really, really shy.” They knew it was love when they both
pronounced deep feelings for Salinger and the soundtrack of the film
The Mission. Their first date, a few weeks later,
was a party
at the Hollywood Hills home of counterculture guru Dr. Timothy Leary,
who is her godfather. “We were kinda blessed,” said
Depp, a Beat
disciple. As it happens, Winona’s father is an esteemed Beat
bookseller in Petaluma, California, where she and Depp weekend often.
“My parents really love him a lot,” she told me.
Depp said: “It could have been easy not to like me. Other
people might have
just seen tattoos.”

Tim
Burton calls the couple “kind of an evil version of Tracy and
Hepburn.” Which is to say, as celebrity couples go, these two
are
dark, spunky, glamorous and resilient, all requisite traits in this
cynical age. For they are beset. Tabloid photographers terrorize
them at airports, and tabloid reporters regularly report imaginary
squalls and breakups. So he gets angry, and she gets incredulous.
Winona: “They try to trip me at
airports!” Depp: “What’s shitty about
them is they feel like you owe them! That you
should stop dead in your tracks and let them piss on you!”
Winona: “I will say that there are some
really nice ones.” Depp: “A couple of them are real
nice.” Winona: “But aren’t
we allowed to be in a bad mood sometimes? Everybody else is.”

We
found Jesus after lunch. Winona
left (took the car again), and
Depp and I stepped out into daylight, where we saw a miracle. There,
on Santa Monica Boulevard, in front of the Beanery, stood a man who
looked very much like the Son of God—in pictures, at least.
He was
swaddled in robes, his face was serene, his eyes were benevolent, his
hair was long, his beard was crisp, he wore tattered Reeboks and a
decent tan. He even seemed sort of divine, in an approachable street
person sort of way. I do not know if Depp is a praying man, but he
is, evidently, a closet theologian, if one is to judge by the
adroitness with which he interviewed this hallowed figure. First,
perhaps to put the holy man at ease, Depp complimented him on his
clothing. (Was Depp considering a dirty-linen motif for himself?)

“I
have always dressed like this,” said the man in a soft,
commanding
voice. What, Depp inquired, was his name? “Jesus,”
the man
said, although he used the Hispanic pronunciation (Hay-zoos.)
Where had he come from? “Oh, I don’t
know,” he said. “Heaven.” His age?
“Over forty.” Why had he come to Los
Angeles? “I’m here for a special
occasion.” What was the
occasion? “I like it here.” Where did he like it
best? “Beverly Hills.” At which point, Depp
whispered to me,
“Apocalypse. Second Coming. Armageddon.”

Suddenly
a Hollywood climber—short, with a noisy sport coat, on his
way to
lunch—accosted Jesus from the side. “Hey, I just
wrote a story
treatment about a guy who dresses like Christ and wanders the
streets,” the Hollywood guy said, seeming as earnest as one
of his
ilk can seem. “Do you have a phone number where you can be
reached
in case a deal happens?” (He did not notice Depp, who looked
properly mortified.) Jesus regarded the pitch artist wordlessly, but
his message was abundantly clear: idiot. Defeated, the guy slunk
away. Said Jesus, “He was different, huh?”

“You
want a cigarette for the road?” Depp asked him. Jesus
assented,
and together the robed one and the young actor smoked for a while.
“Take the pack,” Depp told him. “I can
buy some more.” Afterward, Depp seemed thrilled. “I
smoked with Christ!” he
said, not a little boastfully. “Jesus is a Marlboro
man!”

Perhaps
it was the brush with Jesus that
did it, but Depp spoke to me
from the heart that night. He seemed somehow inspired by the divine
fellow. “I wish I could grow more facial hair,” he
said,
bemoaning the wispiness of his whiskers. “I can only get an
Oriental sort of beard.” Spooning up corn chowder in a tiny
restaurant, he was openly penitent about his “younger,
hellion,
hitting-the-sauce-hard kind of days.” He owned up to his
short
fuse: “I’ve got a bit of a temper.” He
spoke of a tussle or
two and of the circumstances surrounding his arrest in Vancouver
during his 21 Jump Street tenure. Apparently, he
tried to
visit some friends late one night in their hotel, where Depp himself
had once lived, and a security guard would have none of it.
“The
guy had a boner for me,” Depp said. “He had a wild
hair up his
ass, and he got real mouthy with me, saying ‘I know who you
are,
but you can’t come up unless you’re a guest
here.’ The mistake
he eventually made was to put his hands on me. I pushed him back,
and then we sort of wrestled around a bit, and I ended up
spittin’
in his face.”

The
police didn’t want to hear Depp’s story. He was
jailed for a
night, fingerprinted, posed for mug shots (“I wish I could
have
them.”), and in the morning he walked.

But
the most beloved legends of Depp are not violent legends. Hardly. For
Depp is a name synonymous with great romance. In his young life,
he has asked for the troth of four separate women. Whereas other
actors are elusive Lotharios, Depp is the marrying kind,
unintimidated by the notion of connubial permanence. (Is he trying
to succeed where his parents did not?) “I knew this was gonna
come
up,” he said, looking stricken. But Depp is nothing if not
courageous. So, for the first time ever in recorded media, he
offered these assorted insights into his mythic ardor:
“I’ve
never been one of those guys who goes out and screws everything
that’s in front of him . . . When you’re
growing
up, you go
through a series of misjudgments. Not bad choices, but wrong
choices . . . You know, people make
mistakes. We all fuck up . . . I
was really young for the longest time. We were young. [My
relationships] weren’t as heavy as people think they were. I
don’t
know what it is, possibly I was trying to rectify my family’s
situation or I was just madly in love . . .
You’re the
first
person that I’ve talked to about this kind of stuff. And
I’m
being really honest with you when I say that there’s been
nothing
ever throughout my twenty-seven years that’s comparable to
the
feeling I have with Winona . . . It’s like
this weird,
bounding
atom or something. You can think something is the real thing, but
it’s different when you feel it. The truth is very powerful.
Now
I know. Believe me, this Winona Forever tattoo is
not
something I took lightly . . . Her eyes kill
me.”

He
then said this about his engagement to Winona: “People
don’t
realize this, but we’ve been together almost a year and a
half. Out of any, whatever, thing I’ve
been through before, it
hasn’t been this long. It wasn’t like,
‘Hi, nice to meet you,
here’s a ring.’ It was about five months [before we
got
engaged]. They thought we ran away to Las Vegas and got
married.” When will their nuptials actually transpire?
“The wedding thing?”
he said. “We’re just gonna do it when we both have
time, because
we both know we’re gonna end up working in the next couple of
months. And we want to be able to do it when we can get hitched and
then go away for a few months. Leave the country, just go wandering
around, and be on a beach somewhere with tropical drinks.

“I’ve
never actually come out and said this,” Depp added
portentously,
“but the one claim to fame I’m most proud of is
that I’m
responsible for having John Waters ordained. I sent in to the
Universal Life Church and had him ordained by mail. He’s now
Reverend John Waters, and we want John to perform the ceremony. Who
better? You know what I mean? John is a stand-up guy. And Winona
loves the idea.”

(From
the sanctum of Pastor Waters: “I told them I
wouldn’t do it
without their parents’ blessing,” said the
Reverend. “I mean,
I’ve met her parents! They’ve
eaten dinner here! I’m
not gonna just horrify them. And of course, I always counsel Johnny
and Winona—too young! I tell them to wait,
wait, wait! But I’d be thrilled to perform the
ceremony—I’d feel like
the pope!”

My
last day with Depp went like this:
I picked him up at home,
which wasn’t really home but a small bungalow he and Winona
were
briefly renting. (Their new house was not yet inhabitable.) Depp
was on the kitchen phone, pacing furiously, caffeine wiring his
arteries. Heaps of laundry and luggage and books cluttered the
living-room floor. A stray cat was loose in the house. Winona was
out. Mail was strewn about. Depp told me about his fan mail, unique
in its female pubic-hair content—“I’ve
gotten some weird pubes”
is how he put it. We got into my car and drove. We passed a
slatternly pedestrian. “That,” said Depp,
“was a man in drag.” Depp cannot be fooled.

We
passed a coffee shop adorned with a giant rooster. “I have
one of
those,” he said, meaning the rooster. “I have a
nine-foot
rooster. I have the biggest cock in Los Angeles. My large cock is
in storage.”

This
was the old Depp, spry and antic as ever. He saw a dog and said,
coincidentally, that he based his Edward Scissorhands performance on
a dog. “He had this unconditional love,” said Depp,
who probably
cherishes that role above any other in the Depp repertoire.
“He
was this totally pure, completely open character, the sweetest thing
in the world, whose appearance is incredibly dangerous—until
you
get a look at his eyes. I missed Edward when I was done. I really
miss him.”

We
drove to Harry Houdini’s house, which wasn’t really
a house but a
scattering of ruins perched above Laurel Canyon. Houdini’s
ruins,
they say, are haunted. Depp read from a guidebook, “Nearby
Canyon
residents tell of strange happenings on the hilltop site.”
Depp,
incidentally, believes that he was once Houdini. “I often
think I
might have been Houdini at one time,” he said. So we dropped
over
to see if anything looked familiar to him. We scaled a steep hill
and found a crumbling staircase and little else.
“There’s no
house,” Depp said, disappointed. He was now obviously soured
on
the whole endeavor. “I bet this was a really romantic place
at
night,” he added dreamily. Then a German woman emerged from a
nearby house and, apparently mistaking us for urban archaeologists,
chased us off. “Yes, ma’am,” Depp said
politely as we fled.

Here
is how I will remember Depp best: After the Houdini incident, he
grew more and more quixotic, thirsting for the wondrous possibilities
that lay before him. We snaked through the Hollywood Hills, whose
ripened lore endlessly enchants Depp. “I would love to buy
Bela
Lugosi’s old house,” he said. “Or Errol
Flynn’s. Or Charlie
Chaplin’s. I want some old, depressing history to call my
own. Plus, I love the idea of a view.’ He sat in silent
reverie, but
within moments was overtaken with purpose. “I think I just
have to
make a lot of cash,” he said calmly. “I also think
I want to be
a sheik. I want to be the sheik of Hollywood. What do you have to
do to become a sheik, anyway? I wonder if it just takes cash . . .”

Before
any further grandiosity could delude him, however, Depp made me stop
the car. “Something’s wrong with that
mailbox!” he said,
pointing to a blue corner mailbox that seemed to have exploded.
“I’ll go see what happened.” With that,
he hurried to assist a
U.S. postal worker hunched over the damaged box. I cannot be certain
of how Depp managed to help. But now, whenever mail is delivered
safely and on time anywhere in this great land, I don’t think
it
would be presumptuous to say that one American actor did his part.